‘Vivid word pictures’: The letters of Joan Eardley

Between the 1940s and the 1960s, the painter Joan Eardley (1921–63) was a prolific letter writer, often writing daily to friends, family, lovers and associates. In person, she often appeared diffident, shy and unassuming (particularly in professional contexts), but her private letters, in contrast, reveal an altogether more expressive, witty and erudite character. The critic and artist Cordelia Oliver described her letters as ‘vivid word pictures’, full of evocative visual description and detailed accounts of her creative process. Eardley’s writing often veers on the ekphrastic in her attempts to convey the experience of painting, her use of colour and undaunted efforts to capture the changing weather and light. A portrait of the artist as a young woman, the artist’s letters offer readers an insight into the life of a painter utterly absorbed by and committed to her work in the mid-twentieth century.